


darling

by Askance



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, Horror, M/M, Mild Gore, discussion of self-harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-05
Updated: 2013-12-05
Packaged: 2018-01-03 12:38:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1070552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean is dead. Sam has a theory that nothing will ever hurt again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	darling

Sam has a theory that nothing will ever hurt again.

 

It takes him a good four hours to dig the grave. He has a lot of time to think.

 

The day is hot and lies curled across his sweating shoulders, malignant, grey, and he sweats until his lips are dry and cracking and he doesn't think he can sweat anymore. His hands are bleeding where they're gripping the handle of the spade, where the rough wood has shredded his palms and torn away his callouses, but there isn't any pain. Just the burning, and the blood. There's a buzzing in his ears that he can't identify. Maybe it's the cloud of his grief. Maybe, while he's been toiling here, feet planted into the ground, dirt beneath his broken fingernails, maybe cicadas have climbed into his skull and set to their singing there.

 

Dean is wrapped up in an old tarp on the ground beside the hole and he doesn't like that; it doesn't feel right. He didn't have time to build a coffin. Couldn't bring himself to build a pyre.

 

But he has this theory, and it's been building, formulating, curling and solidifying in his heat-sick brain, and by the time the grave is four feet deep it's almost a conclusion. Nothing will ever hurt again. His hands don't, even though they're full of splinters. His head doesn't, even though the pale sharp sun has been beating down on it for hours. His legs don't, even though they've been supporting his weight and the throw of his back and the motion of his arms and must be tired and would rightfully be sore with exhaustion. But there's nothing.

 

He wonders—is almost certain, by five feet down—if it's possible for pain to forsake a person. If it all went out of him, some kind of bloodletting of the soul, at the same moment that the light left his brother's eyes. If it sprouted spirit-legs and walked out of his mouth, took hold of Dean's soul and flitted upwards with it and left him behind. Cold tears on his face and a limp hand in his. He thinks, maybe that's right—maybe Dean died and pulled all the feeling out of him, because he certainly hasn't been able to cry since. Hasn't been able to move, really, except to move the body and move the car and move the shovel, but none of it is _him._ He's somewhere far back in his skull with the cicadas. Detached and pushed aside.

 

He puts the body in the hole when it is deep enough and stands there for a while, staring down at it, the toes of his boots pushing the edge of the pit. The tarp came back from Dean's face when he laid him down and he doesn't recognise it anymore. It's hollow and stiff and he is a little afraid of it although he is also a little inclined, now that he thinks of it, to climb back down there and curl up in the little empty space left beside his brother's body and close his eyes and sleep. And starve to death, down there. Hands curled up against Dean's silent chest, watching the clouds and the night and the rain roll over and back and away in their pageantry until the life goes out of him, too.

 

It wouldn't be painful. He doesn't have pain anymore. Just the null, blackened marrow in his bones, and the annoyance of being alive pressed up against the inside of his head.

 

He wishes he could cry. But crying is hope, and he doesn't have that either. To cry would be to assume that someone were listening to his sorrow, that someone would care about his grief, that someone might be persuaded to be pitiful, and that's a joke.

 

He stands there for a long time, thinking of what to do.

 

Flies come. They dart down into the grave and back out again. Sam thinks it looks a little like a crime scene on television. The new-discovered secrets of some serial murderer, a body in a tarp that somebody loved once, when they had the capability to feel that much. He doesn't look real. He looks plasticine, toy-like, and Sam knows he'd be warm if he were to touch him now. Sick, slick warm, the slime of something starting to rot.

 

What is there to do? Stand here leaning on his spade listening to the cicadas beating around inside his skull. Watch the worms and the maggots and the moss climb up inside his brother's corpse and burst it open and eat it clean. Dig a second grave, maybe, right beside it, and go to sleep in there.

 

Someone who still had pain would leave. Fill in the dirt and go home and weep and recover one day. But nothing can ever hurt him again; he knows that, while the sun begins to sink behind his head. Nothing is ever going to hurt anymore. Nothing could possibly hurt him more than feeling Dean sigh away, off into some greater atmosphere, bloody and brutalised and helpless, and Sam unable to save him or even begin to try, and Sam alone now, acutely aware of how big the world is without his brother to fill up so much of the sky. Pitilessly acquainted with the knowledge of his solitude. He could walk off now in a straight line through the trees and the roads and the towns and the wildernesses and straight into the ocean and no one would know. And the drowning wouldn't hurt, either. It wouldn't hurt at all.

 

Sam fills up the grave because it's the only thing there is to do. Wipes his bloody hands on his jeans. The cicadas must crawl out of his ears as he goes back to the car because by the time he slips inside there is only silence in the universe and all of it is in his own head and he goes home, wherever that is, to the room he has a key for.

 

As soon as he closes the door behind him he realises he can't remember where he dug that grave. Can't remember the turns and the exits he took to get there or why he chose it or when or how, and so it's gone, just like the hurt, just like everything else.

 

He leans against the door. He has all the time left in eternity to think.

 

The solution, he decides, is that he's dead, too. Dead things have no pain and so he must be dead. His soul crawled out past his teeth to follow after his pain and that is why nothing hurts and nothing twinges and nothing touches and nothing is.

 

He could sit down at the table and cut off his fingers one by one, and arrange them in order from longest to smallest. He could carve the alphabet into his chest without blinking, or break his own feet, or pull out his eyes with his fingernails; and why not? Maybe if he takes himself apart he can start to understand how Dean feels, being dead. Maybe if he organises all his limbs in their pieces on the motel bed he can start to follow after. No one is left to tell him not to. Nothing exists to keep him from it anymore.

 

There's a blackfly in the room. It's humming by the window. It takes him a long time to move into the bathroom, where all his things and all of Dean's are still laid out. They'd intended to come back here after the hunt, he remembers. Had intended to order Chinese and fuck each other on the part of the mattress that had bad springs and sagged. And maybe to kiss a little, and be gentle, and watch the moon through the window, but now the place is cold, and savage sterile sunlight is scouring the floor through the dirty blinds and someone has to clean up all this mess but first, he thinks, there's the business of undoing himself, at least a little. If he goes to bed whole, if he dares sleep like that, he thinks he might wake up to find that he's still alive, after all.

 

Dean's razor is on the sink, still plugged in. Sam looks at it, from that great far distance back inside his head.

 

They'd intended to come back here and fuck each other on the ruined side of the bed and Dean would have tangled his fingers in Sam's hair and called him names and bruised his lips with his teeth. He would have yanked Sam's head back by the curls at the nape of his neck because he knew Sam liked that. Liked that pull and pain. But things had Gone Badly and Dean is dead and it all happened very very fast and there's no Chinese food and no sex and no nothing, for that matter, except a cluttered lifeless room and a fly in the window and this razor, here, and him, and he's hardly anything at all, just a few scraps of dream and a heaviness so big it's eating up everything else that could possibly be left, and well, he doesn't need that hair anymore, not if there are no fingers in it to make it hurt and no mouth to smirk that it's pretty and no cheek to press against it.

 

The razor's noise beats into his head like cicadas always have. Curls come off in dark waves and featherstrokes against his collarbone. The mirror is cracked across the image of his face as if his eye has been blasted out, and his hands are still bloody, but they're steady, and this is a kind of mutilation after all, though it doesn't hurt. Because nothing will ever hurt again, not even a little bit.

 

Now, he thinks, would be an appropriate time to cry. He wishes he could mourn this. He wishes he could mourn at all. It would be so much harder than this thing he is right now. Frozen-eyed and gaping and everything that would have been of worth clinging obstinately to his mouth and unwilling to go back inside.

 

His head feels light and cold when he is done. The face in the mirror isn't his anymore.

 

The blackfly whispers in. Lands on his lower lip as he puts the razor down, and crawls a little ways across it. He wonders if it knows that he is dead. He wonders if it will climb onto his tongue and lay its eggs there, if they will hatch and eat him up, larvae between his teeth, and maggots in his throat.


End file.
